Kim Krans presents large-scale sculpture and works on paper. Six freestanding trees crafted from plaster, wire, and cement form an eerie forest while works on paper, elaborately layered with materials such as acrylic, spray paint, ink, gouache, wood, plaster, fur, glitter, glue, and pebbles, present surreal visions of landscape. Both the sculpture and drawings emphasize the relationship between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional world, questioning the illusionary space within a drawing, and the real, bodily space the sculptural works occupy. The thin white tree sculptures appear as a stark, linear drawing through space, while the drawings themselves are built into high relief areas that project out from the wall.

Krans often deals with the distillation of memories whether experienced or imagined as they relate to the construction of our psychological engagement with nature and landscape. She uses the language of romanticism – forging color, light, and luscious materials in an effort that is simultaneously emotional and skeptical. The work reminds us that the sublimity of nature as an aesthetically and emotionally transformative experience is also a social construct.

As Krans states, “The potential for our experiences to be so haunting and so false at the same time is a great stimulus for the forms and textures I use in my work. I am trying to get at an image that I remember but do not know by using materials that are convincing and evocative yet loaded with falseness and seduction. All ideas of authenticity then collapse into a negotiation between the logical and the sensory world, between the physical object and the dream.”